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The aim of this article is to develop a spatial model for multi-subject fMRI data. There has been extensive work on univariate modeling of each voxel for single and multi-subject data, some work on spatial modeling of single-subject data, and some recent work on spatial modeling of multi-subject data. However, there has been no work on spatial models that explicitly account for inter-subject variability in activation locations. In this article, we use the idea of activation centers and model the inter-subject variability in activation locations directly. Our model is specified in a Bayesian hierarchical framework which allows us to draw inferences at all levels: the population level, the individual level, and the voxel level. We use Gaussian mixtures for the probability that an individual has a particular activation. This helps answer an important question that is not addressed by any of the previous methods: What proportion of subjects had a significant activity in a given region. Our approach incorporates the unknown number of mixture components into the model as a parameter whose posterior distribution is estimated by reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo. We demonstrate our method with a fMRI study of resolving proactive interference and show dramatically better precision of localization with our method relative to the standard mass-univariate method. Although we are motivated by fMRI data, this model could easily be modified to handle other types of imaging data.

Original publication

DOI

10.1111/j.1541-0420.2008.01190.x

Type

Journal article

Journal

Biometrics

Publication Date

12/2009

Volume

65

Pages

1041 - 1051

Addresses

Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. lei.xu@vanderbilt.edu

Keywords

Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Brain Mapping, Models, Statistical, Monte Carlo Method, Bayes Theorem, Markov Chains, Biometry